Just over three years ago was a call by an open-source developer to deprecate the Linux kernel's FBDEV drivers. While more companies these days are investing more into DRM drivers, FBDEV drivers are still maintained by the latest Linux kernel releases.

Already mailed in for the Linux 4.3 kernel merge window this week were the numerous ARM SoC updates while being sent in over the night were the ARM64/AArch64 architectural changes for this next version of the Linux kernel.

Recently within our forums there was a request to do performance-per-dollar benchmarks and reporting. Today I came up with a way to make this process very easy and trivial, that you can do too when carrying out your own open-source Linux tests.

Earlier this year I wrote about protecting our Linux test farm with the Nest Protect. While I own ten of these "high tech smoke detectors" and initially recommended, I no longer trust them after a long night.

Are the ARM SoC vendors deciding to become more open? Besides NVIDIA contributing to the open-source Nouveau driver for Tegra K1+ hardware and making improvements in that area, Qualcomm started contributing to the Freedreno / MSM driver project last year, which is the reverse-engineered, community-based driver for Adreno graphics hardware. Qualcomm has now taken a significant step forward and actually released some register documentation!

Marek Olšák of AMD this morning announced libdrm 2.4.63 as the newest version of this DRM Library that interfaces between the Linux kernel DRM drivers and the user-space DDX and Mesa components, among other user-space graphics code.

After writing last month about The Insane Power Use Of Benchmarking Linux Every Day as part of looking at the electrical use of our Linux benchmarking farm powering Phoronix, LinuxBenchmarking.com, etc. Here's this month's numbers.

Just hours after writing about the Raspberry Pi firmware driver being under review for possible inclusion into Linux 4.3, Eric Anholt has posted some stripped down versions of his VC4 DRM driver for review.

For benchmarkers, or distributions that ship the closed source drivers, it might be a pain to constantly be swapping between the two closed source drivers. It would appear that one developer was annoyed by this enough to try and create a solution. Meet: gpu-driver-swap by mikeanthonywild.

If you're still relying upon a vintage XGI Volari graphics card or have a XGI integrated GPU on a server motherboard, thanks to the NetBSD folks there are 19 patches for the xf86-video-xgi open-source driver.

DisplayLink's line of USB display adapters is known to be Linux-friendly and backed by open-source support, but this is only for their USB 2.0 devices. Fortunately, it appears that DisplayLink is finally working on USB 3.0 device support for Linux.

This week I posted the results of a 15-way graphics card comparison on Ubuntu Linux with AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards while running the very latest proprietary drivers. Those tests were focused on 4K resolution testing in order to stress the latest-generation AMD/NVIDIA GPUs. However, if you want to see 1080p numbers, here are some benchmark-friendly results.

While it's been several months since the Purism Librem crowd-funding campaing got underway for producing "the first high-end laptop in the world that ships without mystery software in the kernel, operating system, or any software applications," the Librem 15 still relies upon a proprietary BIOS and there's still no easy fix.

Matias Bjørling continues tackling support for "open-channel SSDs" within Linux. His fourth revision to his Open-Channel SSD patch-set has been published and re-based against code in development for the Linux 4.3 kernel.

Recently you may have heard of OCZ launching their new Trion 100 series, which is the latest example of low-cost solid-state storage. The OCZ Trion 240GB costs just $90 USD and the larger capacities are also around $0.375 per GB. In having picked up one of these cheap SSDs for another Linux test system recently, I ran some basic open-source Linux benchmarks on the Trion 100.

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